Angelique Kidjo still a voice of Africa

New album inspired by visit to village

By Jon Pareles, New York Times

Published 4:33 pm, Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Photo: COLUMBIA RECORDS

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In an undated handout photo, Angelique Kidjo, a singer and songwriter born in Benin. Kidjo, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, says the inspiration for her new album "Eve" came during a visit to Kenyan villages, and African traditions and sensibilities are ever-present in her songs, even though she left Benin in 1983, first to live in Paris and later New York. (Columbia Records via The New York Times) -- PHOTO MOVED IN ADVANCE AND NOT FOR USE - ONLINE OR IN PRINT - BEFORE JAN. 19, 2014. -- NO SALES; FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY WITH STORY SLUGGED MUSIC-KIDJO BY PARELES. ALL OTHER USE PROHIBITED. ORG XMIT: XNYT44 less

In an undated handout photo, Angelique Kidjo, a singer and songwriter born in Benin. Kidjo, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, says the inspiration for her new album "Eve" came during a visit to Kenyan villages, and ... more

Photo: COLUMBIA RECORDS

Angelique Kidjo still a voice of Africa

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Angelique Kidjo, the songwriter and singer from Benin, was in Kenya being a do-gooder when the concept of her new album, "Eve," came to her, she said, "like a lightbulb blowing up in your head."

Kidjo, who is a UNICEF good will ambassador, was visiting remote Kenyan villages, along with the executive director of UNICEF, Kenya's minister of health and a CNN crew, to draw attention to the widespread malnutrition that can leave children stunted for life.

In the village of Merti, where a pilot program was helping mothers and children, Kidjo was greeted by women harmonizing and dancing to a joyful, traditional welcome song. Soon, Kidjo was singing along. Her husband and songwriting collaborator, Jean Hebrail, caught the moment on video, and the women's voices became the core of Kidjo's version of the song, "M'Baamba," the first song on "Eve" (429 Records).

In an interview at her apartment in Brooklyn, Kidjo, 53, recalled thinking: "This is the album right here. It has to be about these women, how they prevail in hard surroundings and still smile."

Village traditions, cosmopolitan transformations, female solidarity, African pride and perpetual energy have been constants in Kidjo's recording career. She's an expatriate who has never left Africa behind; in a career of making transnational hybrids, she has kept African languages and an African sensibility at the core of her music.

Along with the "Eve" album, Kidjo has just released her autobiography, "Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music" (HarperCollins), which traces her life story from the small town of Ouidah, on the coast of Benin in West Africa, where her family's ancestral home still stands. From there, she went on to reach an international audience, win a Grammy Award and stand alongside world leaders as a voice of Africa.

Kidjo has not lived in Benin since she slipped out in 1983 and settled in Paris. She was leaving behind a Communist dictatorship that wanted songwriters to praise the revolution continually, but she was also setting aside her growing stardom in West Africa and losing contact — for six years, until democracy came to Benin — with a family that had been uncommonly supportive of her ambitions.

Yet she still writes most often in the West African languages she grew up speaking, Fon (her father's heritage) and Yoruba (her mother's). She also speaks two more of Benin's local languages, Mina and Goun, along with French, English, the German she studied in school and the Portuguese and Italian she is learning now.

Kidjo does not read music. Like a traditional musician, she has an extraordinary memory, singing everything by ear — including, this month, the premiere of "Ife," an orchestral piece with her lyrics (from Yoruba creation legends), set to complex, meter-shifting music by Philip Glass.

When she attended the CIM jazz school in Paris in the 1980s, she would memorize the music she was pretending to read. Once her instructor realized what she was doing, he exempted her from studying notation, saying that she had the kind of memory he would kill for.

Her approach to songwriting also follows African tradition: She sings as the conscience of a community. She still abides, she says, by advice that her family gave her. One of the first songs she wrote, as a teenager, was an angry denunciation of apartheid in South Africa; her father insisted that she rewrite it without the hate and anger, telling her: "An artist's role is not to ignite violence. You ignite peace."

Another lesson came from her uncle after she attended a traditional funeral ceremony and was surprised to see people dancing to songs with grim lyrics. "People are dancing, but they're listening," her uncle told her, she said. "The message is sinking in. It's not up to us to make people feel guilty, to patronize them, or to give them any lesson. It's up to us to put it out there bare naked. What each one does with it is their choice. That's how you do music. That's what you're there for. You be the facilitator, the one that triggers things to change, but you're not God. You're not telling them what they have to do."

She said, "So every little song that I've written throughout the years to tell a story is always like that, to put it out there as it is."

The songs on "Eve" celebrate women's strength and potential in African contexts. "Bomba" is about the pride women take in traditional African dresses. "Kulumbu" suggests that since women suffer during wartime, they should have a say in negotiating the peace. A pair of songs addresses the practice of forced marriage: "Cauri," the lament of a young girl whose parents have chosen a husband for her, and "Hello," about the happiness of a love match.

During the 1990s, Kidjo recorded her albums using typical pop methods: layering parts together. But a decade ago, she decided, "Enough of this nonsense," she said. "I want everybody in the same studio. I want the feeling of us sharing. The song is written like that; it can go somewhere else. Let's give life to those things. If it goes to another route, we follow it because it's the right one, because we're all taking the same road. We cannot all be wrong."

Her core band includes guitarists Lionel Loueke, who is from Benin, and Dominic James, who has worked with her since 2002. In a telephone interview, James said that six of the songs on "Eve" were recorded in a daylong session, complete with vocals. "She's just a powerhouse," he said.

Various songs on "Eve" feature New Orleans pianist Dr. John, guitarist Rostam Batmanglij from Vampire Weekend, the Kronos Quartet and the Luxembourg Philharmonic. But they also feature Kidjo's 87-year-old mother, Yvonne, all sorts of Beninese percussion played by members of the Gangbe Brass Band, and nine local choirs of women Kidjo recorded across Benin.